


The Past Comes Back to Haunt You

by AwashSquid



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, some slightly graphic imagery, the relationship here is in the past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-26 11:39:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10786017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwashSquid/pseuds/AwashSquid
Summary: An alternative way in which Soldier 76 discovers Reaper's identity, and what follows afterwards.





	1. Chapter 1

“Shit,” Jack cursed under his breath. There had been five members of the Los Muertos gang, and one of them had been smart enough to split up and flank him from behind. His reflexes, he thought, grimacing as he attempted to stand, were not what they once were. Even all those chemicals could only do so much, and they damn sure didn’t help him deflect bullets. 

He stood and inhaled deeply, feeling two cracked ribs on his left twinge with the gesture. He had managed to dodge the bullets but had landed hard on the cobblestone street. The gang had run off, assuming that they killed him. A small mercy, perhaps. He wasn’t sure if he could have taken them all, not injured like this.

Not that he wouldn’t have gone down trying.

The whole endeavor had been stupid, really, he thought bitterly as he injected himself with biotic medicine, feeling the instant relief it provided to his aching ribs. Jack began to walk down the alley, pulse rifle still raised and ready to fire if the gang members decided to come back. He had just been passing through and saw them ransacking a store—none of his business—but he thought of a little girl who still called him a hero, and he thought of the old woman who owned the store and was barely making ends meet, and so he squared his shoulders and called out to the group.

“Gotta stop being so soft,” he growled out loud, automatically checking the corner and clearing it before turning right. It was well past nightfall now, and the narrow, zigzagging streets in El Dorado gave troublemakers plenty of places to hide. Never could be too careful.

But goddamn, how beautiful the _barrios_ could be at night. A tiny smile pulled at the ruined corners of his mouth, hidden beneath his mask, as he looked at the stars. They were so much clearer here than in the big cities of the world, where light pollution all but killed any constellation-watching. He had grown up where you could find your way by the stars, could see the farthest galaxies without so much as a telescope as you strolled through the cornfields, and some sentimental part of him felt comforted by the familiar presences of Ursa Major, of Hercules, of Orion, all waiting in the sky. He passed the flower shop, smelling the sweet carnations even through his mask, set out for sale the next day.

The smell kept growing sweeter even as he kept walking, so he slowed his pace. Maybe something wrong with the damn filter again, Jack thought, scrunching his nose a little in distaste. But the aroma kept increasing in strength, and soon it was no longer the smell of flowers, but some other smell, some odor that had him on edge with its overpowering stench, and then it was so strong he could taste it—

The smell of rotting flesh.

Soldier 76 stopped, knees bent and still ready to run, and flicked on his visor. He could see the distant thermal outlines of people in the nearby houses, the small figure of a stray cat sniffling through garbage… He turned around, and suddenly the visor was completely engulfed in blue, seeing only the coldness of the thing in front of him.

“Hello, Jackie,” the Reaper growled, and he raised his rifle, but it was too late. He felt his legs crumple before he even registered the punch to his cracked ribs, making the pain flare up and spread, sudden and wild, as he felt at least two more fracture under the hit.

His visor flipped off automatically after the hit, designed to not impede close-combat fighting, and he looked up into the bone-white mask of the Reaper, watching the other man crack his knuckles and listening to the sickening pop of his bones. He didn’t hesitate before snapping up his rifle and firing his helix rockets directly into the abdomen of his opponent. 

But no impact came. The Reaper had somehow dissolved, looking more like smoke than a human, and the rockets passed right through him, hitting the wall behind and shattering the brick. 

“So quick to fight,” growled the voice, coming from all around him now as the black mist circled him, the smell of dead flesh so potent that he nearly gagged. “I just want to talk.” The remark was whispered in his ear from behind, and he spun around on his knees only to see the Reaper drift back about ten feet.

“Then talk,” Soldier retorted, getting to his feet again, ignoring the stabbing pain in his ribs. “But you’ve got the wrong man.”

His opponent reformed, the mist returning to a human shape, and his grip on his rifle tightened, waiting for Reaper to twitch towards his shotguns. But his arms remained crossed, even as his shoulders moved up and down, chuckling deeply. “Oh, no. I’ve been watching you for a while, _Jackie_ ,” he taunted, and the nickname turned Jack’s stomach, “and I’m sure I’ve got this right.” Reaper vanished suddenly, Jack jumping a little in alarm at the man’s quick disappearance.

“Don’t I, Morrison?” The kick to the back of his knees was hard and sent him to the ground, hands reaching out automatically to catch himself, the rifle slipping from his grip. He scrambled for it, but it was kicked away by black steel-toed boots just as his fingertips glanced it. “Play nice, Jackie,” the man admonished, and Jack swung at the man’s legs, only to have him turn into mist again, evading the blow. He felt a boot kick his left side, and he couldn’t help but cry out in pain, his entire ribcage now feeling broken and splintered as he fell onto his hands breathing heavily.

“I thought you just wanted to talk,” Jack spat, tasting blood in his mouth, mingling sickly with the taste of old flesh. He felt a clawed glove lift his chin almost tenderly, and he could see nothing behind the black eyes of the mask in front of him.

“I do.” The grip on his chin turned to a chokehold around his neck, and their heads clashed together hard, his visor shattering under the impact. Jack’s vision went black and he panicked, scrabbling at the mask to remove it even as the hand let go of his throat. The visor popped off easily, and he let the ruined equipment fall to the ground. His vision without it was poor but still better than being trapped in utter blackness.

He saw the mask, still so close to him, the head cocked to the side curiously. “My, my, Morrison. Not such a pretty boy any more, huh?” A claw gently traced over one of the long scars that crossed his face, and Jack grimaced at the contact. 

“What do you want, Reaper?” Jack snarled, feeling less like a trained super-soldier and more like a caged animal, lashing out wildly at his captor.

“I want to talk to Commander Morrison,” came the reply, the clawed hand pulling back for the elbow to rest on his knees, Reaper squatting casually before him.

Jack barked out a laugh. “That man died a long time ago.”

“Perhaps,” Reaper mused. “But so did I.” His arms raised, and Jack tightened his fist, ready to swing, but Reaper’s hands went to his own head. “You showed me yours. How about I return the favor?” The question went unanswered as he lifted off his mask.

Jack blinked several times, willing his vision to come into focus, seeing the man’s face shift—then he realized that it wasn’t his vision; that the face was actually moving and shifting constantly, healing and degenerating into pallid grey flesh, pieces of that falling off and turning into fine black vapor before the skin showed up anew and the process began all over. He was so focused on watching the right cheek disintegrate, seeing the teeth of the skull, pointier than they should be, showing through the missing tissue, that he didn’t look past that one element.

But then he did, and the cruel sneer in front of him was one that he had seen before, seen on a man with darker skin, decades ago, as he screamed and raged about the future. 

Jack met the eyes, red with black irises and white pupils, and he felt all of the wind leave his lungs in a single breath, and on that breath he carried a name:

“Gabe?”

The eyes almost seemed to soften. “You remember after all. I’m touched.” He looked anything but. His lips began to peel away and reveal more of those sharp teeth, and a grey, pointed tongue flicked out and grabbed the skin before it fell.

Jack couldn’t help but feel disgusted, and he knew it must have shown on his face because Reaper—no, Gabriel—sneered at him. “Got a problem, Morrison?” he questioned, and Jack was struck with the memory that it was the first thing that Reyes had said to him, so long ago it felt like lifetimes had passed.

“No, sir,” came the automatic reply, and Jack found himself smiling. He knew it was lopsided, the right side of his mouth never having healed properly. For a brief moment, he could have sworn that he saw Gabriel smile, but it was hard to tell given that his mouth was still reforming. For a moment, he felt a surge of his old optimism return, and he wondered if they could make things work somehow. Ana would be sore, but she would accept Gabriel back, and maybe the three of them could continue playing dead but being alive, maybe they could be together again.

Reaper stood suddenly, and Jack felt his hope crash and shatter around him as a shotgun barrel leveled neatly between his eyes. He admonished himself for being so sentimental, so goddamn caught up in the future that he forgot all about the past.

“You and I,” Reaper rasped, the mask being placed back on with his left hand, “have some unfinished business to attend to.”

Jack heard the safety click, and he looked up at the stars. He would have preferred to go fighting, but there were worse ways to die than staring at Draco snaking across the night sky, he thought.

He heard the beeping of a telecom, and Reaper sighed. The barrel was removed as quickly as it had been placed there.

“Some other time. Until then, Morrison.”

And he was gone, only a wisp of black smoke remaining, and even that dissipated into the night sky. Jack slumped down, the adrenaline leaving him, only to be replaced with bone-deep exhaustion. He was getting too old for this, he thought, jamming two biotic injections into his thigh.

He stood then, grabbing his ruined visor and his rifle. He spared one more glance behind him before starting to move. “Till next time, Gabe.”


	2. Decisions

“Looks like you had a rough night.” Ana’s voice was clear in the near-silence of their hideout as her eyes glanced over his cracked visor, the slight pause between his steps, his shallow breathing. She began to unwrap her medical supplies.

“I ran into an old friend,” Jack replied, a little hostility edging under his casual tone. He tossed down the rifle and shucked off his jacket, wincing as he felt shooting pain from his cracked ribs. His shirt followed, any care for modesty around Ana having been lost decades ago when they first started working together. He could see that his left side had some nasty bruising, but nothing he hadn’t experienced before.

Ana tutted at the sight of his wounds, tapping a syringe to ensure its readiness. “This will help with the pain,” she said, a little unnecessarily, but Jack understood and moved to sit next to her on the bed. He didn’t twitch as the needle pierced his skin, but his muscles relaxed a little as the fluid left the chamber, taking the edge off.

“How long did you know?” His voice was tired, but there was still anger running underneath, like a current flowing under a deceptively still pond, ready to suck her under.

“You have a few broken ribs.” Ana evaded the question deftly as she gently felt around his breastbone, fingers quick and precise. “Take a deep breath for me.”

He acquiesced, but then asked again. “How long did you know, Ana?” The growl in his voice was more apparent now, his patience beginning to wear thin. Ana grabbed an ice pack and snapped it to activate the cold, pressing it to his ribs and eliciting a low hiss.

“Since that business with Hakim.” Her eyes flitted over the rest of his torso, but she saw no other injuries, so she leaned back against the pillows.

“We made a deal, Ana. No more secrets.” He turned to stare her down, but she did not yield.

“We made that deal about secrets going forward, Jack. Not about old ghosts.” She knew that it was a technicality, but she hadn’t been sure how to bridge the issue, and she wasn’t sure that she really wanted to.

“I deserved to know,” Jack ground out, fists clenching. “You should have told me.”

Ana shrugged a little. “Probably,” she allowed. “I know he blames you.”

Jack snorted. “Big surprise there.”

She paused. “There is something else, Jack.” She sighed heavily. “Did you see his face?” He recalled the decaying flesh behind the mask with some disgust as he nodded. “He said that Angela did that to him.”

“The tech wasn’t ready yet after all,” he whispered, recalling the argument he had with their lead doctor. She had claimed that providing an overdose of a newly developed biotic medicine could keep an injured soldier—even one on the brink of death—alive and restore their health by making the cells work at an incredibly rapid rate. Jack had been impressed by the science, but was unwilling to risk his soldiers to potential side effects, especially the excruciating pain of the cells too quickly repairing, without further testing. “She must have used it on him.”

Ana nodded. “That’s what I thought too.” She hesitated a moment before adding, “I wonder if she would know a cure.”

“Maybe,” Jack allowed, “but we’re not exactly in a position to ask.”

“You know about the Recall.” The sentence wasn’t a question; they both knew Jack’s obsession with Overwatch, knew that his ear would be to the ground for the slightest whisper about the organization or its members. It’s how he had found Ana, after all.

He snorted in response, carefully standing and crossing to the desk to begin attempted repairs on his visor. “You can’t be thinking about going back.”

Ana shrugged and looked out the window, and Jack could see some softness to her hardened features. “I don’t expect them to understand, or to forgive. That’s not the point. The point is—" and here she inhaled, hands clenching around the sheets beneath her, “—the point is that we have been doing this alone, and with little success. Maybe it would be better with some help. Much as you prefer being alone, it’s not good for you, Jack.” _It’s why you found me,_ she thought, remembering the lost look in his eyes, knowing that he was so much more reckless when he was alone.

Jack didn’t respond, instead sitting down and beginning to take apart his visor, hoping the repairs would be manageable with the few spare parts he had scrounged. His eyesight was mostly gone without it, but when things were close enough he could manage. He removed a few screws and slid off the cracked glass plate, now useless, setting it aside. In it, he saw a warped version of his reflection—an old man, weary and worn, but still fighting to make the world a better place, still unable to let go the dreams of his youth despite knowing that such idealism was foolish at best and deadly at worst. He sighed deeply, knowing that nothing good could come of this. “Fareeha might kill you.”

“Eh, she’ll get over it.”

“I don’t think we’ll exactly be welcomed back with open arms.”

“I don’t think they’ll kick us out, either.”

Jack rubbed his hands against his hair, a habit he had never quite lost. He thought of the funerals, burying two empty graves, and he had watched from a distance each time the caskets were lowered into the earth, thinking that he could walk forward at any moment and assuage their grief, but choosing to stay back, knowing that he had failed them all. “I wouldn’t bet on that one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will probably be posted within the next week. Thanks to everyone reading :)


	3. Chapter 3

The Reaper did not need to consume food or water to survive. He could subsist solely on a diet of soul essence from his kills, and he found that this sustained him longer and more effectively than any other sustenance.

But goddamn it, sometimes he wanted coffee anyway.

It was in this search for coffee that he found himself cursing WIdowmaker, her fancy cappuccino machine, and his inability to get it to brew a cup of plain black coffee. He was on his third attempt to gain what he wanted from the machine, and he was ready to pull out a shotgun and shoot the damn thing once and for all, threatening so much under his breath.

“I don’t think she’d be happy if you did that, Gabe,” came a teasing lilt from behind him. He had growled at her his new identity enough times that it turned meaningless on his ashen tongue, but she still persisted in calling him by the name of a dead man. Probably because she knew that it made him snarl behind his mask.

“Here, let me.” Sombra efficiently made some motions with her left hand, and lo and behold, he heard the machine start to run. After a few moments of silence, black coffee poured out into the mug.

“Thanks,” he grumbled despite himself, grabbing his drink with the intention to take it to his room. No one in Talon had seen him with his mask off besides the initial doctors, and he preferred to keep it that way. Let them wonder.

“Don’t mention it, _amigo_.” He couldn’t tell if she was teasing or if she actually thought that they were friends. He almost laughed at the thought. “Friends” were a luxury that Gabriel Reyes had access to. Not Reaper. And given that his supposed “friends” had left him to become—whatever _this_ was—he couldn’t say he was eager for more of the same treatment.

Reaper found that Sombra was casually leaning against the doorframe, watching him, blocking his typical way out. With a sigh, he prepared to teleport behind her, but then she spoke. “I didn’t know that you could be so merciful, Gabe.” She flicked her wrist, and a video projected itself into the air. Footage from last night in El Dorado. Images of himself with Soldier 76 at his mercy floated up and froze. “You could have killed him, what, twenty times? But you didn’t.”  
The largest screen paused at the frame where his shotgun was directly behind Soldier 76’s head. 

He no longer had the ability to sweat, his body temperature remaining around a steady 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but he felt a little heated just the same. He had picked a street with no security cameras, but it would figure that Sombra would employ her own, just to spy on him. At least she hadn’t gotten an angle where she saw him unmasked. Some secrets were still his after all.

“It’s none of your concern, Sombra.” He stepped closer, towering over her menacingly. “And I don’t appreciate being followed.”

“Oh, _pobrecito,_ I didn’t mean to offend you,” she simpered fakely, the glimmer in her eyes reflecting her amusement at having the upper hand. “I just wanted to do a little research, you know?” She stepped closer, staring him down. “Should I do _more_?”

He growled and felt the coffee cup in his hand begin to crack. “This is not a game. Consider this your last warning.”

“I don’t know, it sure looked like you were playing a game with that _gringo._ I wonder what makes him so special to you.” She flitted her fingers, and the hologram zoomed in on a fuzzy image of Jack’s face, unmasked, half-hidden behind Reaper’s back. “I wonder if I could find out.”

“What do you want?” His voice had transcended its usual growl and was turning into a monstrous reverberation, and he could feel his fingers twitching towards his shotguns.

Sombra shrugged, dismissing the images with a decisive wrist flick. “Just getting some data. You know, if you actually talked a little, I wouldn’t have to spy.” She turned away, waving dismissively over her shoulder. “Something to think about, _friend._ ”

“We aren’t friends,” he retorted, but she had already translocated away. He looked down at the coffee, now cold, he was sure, and he bodily threw the mug in the sink, just to see it shatter.

He would need to be more careful next time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanted to do a look at how Gabe is dealing...plus I really wanted to try my hand at Sombra; I love her character. Chapters following this will probably post once a week (and no, I'm not sure of the length, I'm making this up as I go along!).

**Author's Note:**

> This is literally the first M/M couple I have ever been invested in, and boy howdy am I invested. Will probably update with the next chapter sometime this week.


End file.
